Month: April 2018

Saturday, April 14, 2018

Several times today I was asked a version of this question: “What brings you to Lancaster?” The question does not pertain to mode of transport. Rather there is an assumption that a meeting, a consulting appointment, a presentation, an event of some import is the reason for this trip.

What brings me to Lancaster? None of the above items. Instead, about a dozen and a half  compelling reasons and each of them is still living. I’m having breakfast with some, lunch with some, coffee with some, and the others — we just sit and chat.

Loved ones. People who are part of me. Some of them in their 80s like me while others flourish in their 50s and 60s. Members of my family. Friends from school. Connections from here and there.

As of an hour ago, I was on a winning streak: I remembered each of their names! I learned of one who would not be able to remember my name nor to recognize me. So it goes at this time of life — reason enough to come here for several days to celebrate the gift of friendship.

 

Thursday, April 12, 2018

One of the blog readers who recently entered retirement asked me to offer suggestions on how to do it. His assumption, I gather, builds on his observations that I’ve done it long enough to know the ins and outs, the ups and downs of retirement endurance.

So take me seriously, every word of it.

1. Be retired. That is, enter into the moment, this particular era of now, reside in it, make yourself at home.
2. Inasmuch as a person, when in old age, becomes just a bit more like himself or herself, don’t even think for a moment you’ll be someone different from what you were in the past. Get a kick out of being yourself.
3. My rather long era of retirement leads me to conclude that you will be occupied in four activities: (1) doing, (2) being, (3) loafing, and (4) sleeping. I’ll frankly be surprised if you can reduce the four to three.
4. Invest heavily in breakfast. For me that means an honest-to-goodness premium coffee, a home-made protein bar, fruit, a print newspaper, two e-papers, a Face Book post, in-box reading, the to-do list, a period of silence and then a walk.  Even if it’s downhill from there, you know that you started high.
5. Take a chance, and snoop into something new and perhaps odd and maybe even discombobulating. I dare you. I double dare you.
6. This one is in parts.

• Bless your family.
• Make new friends and keep the old ones.
• Concoct weird to-do lists.
• Buy a lunar roll for your back when you sag on the sofa.
• Invest some time and energy in something bigger than yourself.
• Never ever apologize for enjoyable although kind of dumb diversions.
• Allow yourself to hear the silence of God.

7. And look forward with gratitude, grace and peace  to that moment before and that moment after your death. Welcome death just as you celebrate life.

 

I am pleased to introduce to you my name buddy — J. Daniel Hess.  We have more than a name in common.

• We both grew up on farms in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.
• We are doubly related — in the Hess line we are second cousins, one removed; in the Good line we are fourth cousins once removed.
• We both attended Lancaster Mennonite School.

Then there are differences.

• I graduated LMS in 1955; he in 1998.
• He began college in 2000 at University of Maryland Baltimore County (Isn’t that the school that upset Virginia?); I began college in 1955 at Eastern Mennonite College in Harrisonburg, VA.
• In 2002-2003, he served with the MCC SALT Program in Swaziland (HIV
  and AIDS education program),  also worked at Macha Mission Hospital in Zambia in 2009 as a medical student and traveled to Gaborone, Botswana, in 2012 (with wife, Amy, and two young children) using elective time as a resident physician to work in Accident & Emergency; I led Goshen College Study/Service in Costa Rica in three different occasions, totally five years and with wife Joy and four children lived in Spain for a sabbatical year (1973-74).
• In 2009 he graduated University of Maryland School of Medicine, started residency at Christiana Care Hospital in emergency medicine/ internal medicine; I graduated Syracuse University in 1964 and did subsequent studies at Northwestern University in Chicago and the University of North Carolina.
• Today he is full-time clinical faculty member in the emergency department and part-time with the CCHS internal medicine residency program (Delaware); I am retired and occasional write a blog.

I have never met J.Daniel Hess but indeed it is on my bucket list. How lucky can I be to have such a name buddy.

 

 

Wednesday, April 4, 2018

I was taken back, and then grieved the loss of memory of two of my friends. Here is a poem about the crumbling of the brain.

 

Memory

There’s beauty in an old stone house,
built slowly from foundation up,
with boulder mudded against boulder
set upon solid premises.

Such houses rise stone by stone,
common slabs, but met
by odd shaped, odd sized rocks
that seem at first not to fit.

One storey, two storeys, maybe three.
walls for habitation
rooms for privacy 
yet windowed to the world.

I look with awe upon old stone structures,
whether I stand apart or get up close.
The wonders of a sturdy build
made from what was found.

But I’m sad to see a stone house crumbling
mortar quite beyond repointing
fragments falling as debris
Rubble covered with moss.